The Martian Race (35 page)

When Viktor came in from the ERV work he was carrrying her slate. “I inflated the greenhouse again, patched the break.”

“Fantastic. I've gotta get out there. Did you look at the mat samples?”

He frowned. “No. Found this.”

“My slate. Double fantastic!” She reached for it eagerly.

He held it away from her. “You will rest one more day if I give it to you?”

“Are you serious?”

He nodded. “I have enough to worry about with ERV.”

“Okay, it's a deal. I've got a lot of correspondence to catch up with, now that it's all out in the open.”

She punched up the power and the slate filled with the stored readout from the DNA comparison tests. She fairly hummed as she dug into the results.

By the time Viktor came back from his shower, she was euphoric. “I've got it! These results are great! Woese was right after all.”

“Woese? Who is that?”

“The microbiologist who coined the term
archaea.
His idea was that the bacteria in the group were a whole new kingdom of life. It included a lot of strange anaerobes, known as extremophiles, that lived in places like hot springs, underwater thermal vents, or coal mines. When he compared the genes of the archea to those of other bacteria, he discovered that there was only a sixty percent match. A full forty percent of the archaea genome was unique. But I've found it! The Marsmat DNA matches those genes! Not only did we find life, but it's related to us—very, very distantly, but it's clearly related!” She stopped all of a sudden and beamed at him.

Viktor sat down, toweling his hair. “So we are Martians? Or is vent life from Earth?”

“I don't know. What I
can say
is that the life on both planets was once together, swapping genes, and then it separated, a long time ago. That means life originated on one planet, then migrated to the second. I suppose it could have arisen in a third place altogether, but there's no evidence either way for that. So, to be parsimonious, life probably arose once, on either Mars or Earth.”

“Mars to Earth is much easier energetically. Easier to blast rocks off Mars, and they fall towards sun.”

“Yes, of course, you're right.”

“Is wonderful news—to find cousins in the solar system. You are going to be real big-shot scientist when we get home. Make lots of money on talk shows. I never have to work again!”

She threw a pillow at him.

They knew by now to pace themselves as a team. She would spend another day resting, spraying e-mail to half a dozen colleagues. Fair enough; the weight had nearly lifted from her chest.

She had planned to help Marc with some light packing, but during the day about fifty e-mails poured in. The biological community was eleIctrified with the news. They suggested dozens of additional analyses, and each person had a slightly different interpretation of her work. As she answered them, she wondered why she had not heard anything from the other biologist on Mars, Chen.

Viktor and Raoul had the ERV ready to test in late afternoon, but experience had taught them to not perform critical jobs when they were beginning to tire. So they came in a bit early and ate a large meal. The secret lay in putting the future out of mind until it had arrived.

That night they watched a John Wayne western,
The Searchers.
Her Aussie instincts preferred vistas anyway and this classic was full of them, vast gorgeous landscapes of Monument Valley. As medical officer she had to be crafty, selecting adventure films—her crewmates were men, after all, not exactly addicted to relationship dramas—that featured outdoors adventure instead of, say, exploding cars and cut-to-the-chase movies.

The six-month voyage out had been the hardest. Studies on submarines and in arctic bases had shown that subtle effects could lead to big liabilities. Sub crews suffered vision changes, unable to focus accurately on distant objects after months of seeing nothing farther away than five meters. The U.S. Navy cautioned its sub crews against driving until they'd been ashore at least three days. Submariners on land mistook far objects for near ones. She didn't want accidents after their landing, so she had imposed a go-easy rule the first few days.

There were more insidious effects, too. Even on Mars they spent most of their time inside metal boxes with limited views. The hab's flatscreen video showed them the outside, but there was an elusive lack in looking at a picture instead of
through
a window. They all preferred staring out Red Rover's “windshield” (though it was really a vacuum shield), even after it got scratched and pitted.

So they had watched
The Searchers
for probably the tenth time, chanting some of the dialogue in unison, loving it all. Marc had brought as part of his movie allotment some cheesy movies about Mars itself, titles like Mars Attacks!, Angry
Red Planet, Mars Needs Women, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, Mars
Calling, A
Martian in Paris, Mission to Mars
—good for laughs—and the quite decent
The Martian Chronicles.
This time they skipped looking at these. Instead, Viktor brought out tiny shares of vodka. They played a few hands of poker before turning in, ignoring a priority message from Axelrod.

“Pep talk before the big game,” Raoul snorted. Nobody mentioned the next day.

She and Marc were to stay at a safe distance from the ERV during the full-throttle test.

Viktor explained to them all around the breakfast table, his eyes veiled. “Axelrod, he is pushing for max delta vee on the return trajectory. To cut the flight time. So I need to test system at highest pump speeds. Lift a little, set down, is all.”

Nobody said very much as they suited up. A billion people would be watching and talk would seem like playing to a stage.

Astronauts were not self-doubters. But in the long run, self-doubt was a trait you learned. This mission, doubt had developed into a reflex. Raoul and Viktor went through an elaborate checkdown, calling results back and forth to each other. She and Marc stood near the hab and sent a few commentary squirts for Earthside.

Time ticked on. Waiting was not her strong suit.

She went over to the greenhouse and went in through the lock without cracking her air seal. At the corner of the mist box she bent down. Here was the pale, crusty stalk that had caused it all—dead now, yet still piercing the thick walls with its spiked tip. She marveled at the rugged vigor of the thing, a lance apparently evolved for breaking through to the surface. After how many millennia of hiding below?

Marc helped her search; things had blown around. All their crops were dead, of course, already quite dried out. To her amazement, some of her samples seemed still viable inside the partially crushed glove box.

But in the mist chamber? She ached to do some simple examinations. It was impossible to do anything definitive, but they did seem moist and showed no color change.

“Maybe they can survive on the surface,” she exclaimed happily.

“Not quite raw surface,” Marc said. “This heavy-duty plastic kept off the UV. And they're sitting in wet soil you made, free of peroxides.”

“Good points, dead on. If the atmosphere were thicker, say. If water had melted out locally and destroyed the peroxides in the dust. Then this place could have been like our greenhouse.”

“When?”

“During one of your wet spells.”

“Those were millions of years ago, my cores show.”

“So? These guys were waiting around down in their vent.”

She could see Marc's frown through his helmet plate. “So over time, why didn't they just get rid of this ability, this talent for living on a warmer surface?”

“Two reasons. A very slow mutation rate underground on Mars, plus it's an ability pretty close to what they need to make a go of it in the vent,” she said. “It also happens to be what they need to break out.”

“Pretty clever,” he said.

“Makes you wonder what they're doing at the other end.”

“The other end of the vent?” He blinked. “You still want to do that? After what you've been through with this stuff? That's twice now it's almost gotten you.”

She grinned. “Guess I'm just a biological fool, but yes. I've been thinking about what you said down there in the vent—that Mars is a cooler planet, so the temperate region below ground could extend a lot farther down. Ten klicks deep, all the way over the surface of the planet, right? That's a lot of space to evolve in.”

“Yeah, you're right. I wonder how we can ever get a look at it?”

Viktor's voice came over comm. “Time to end idle scientist talk, be crew members. Take your positions. Start the live vid coverage.”

“Yes sir!” she sent with a chuckle.

Julia started the running commentary for the live-action vid they would squirt to Earth. She tried to keep matters light for Earthside, but the unspoken mood on the spot was grim. Their lives were riding on the plume of scalding exhaust about to come out. She fidgeted with the microcams—Earthside wanted four viewpoints, supposedly for engineering evaluation, but mostly to sell spectacular footage, she was sure.

Her thoughts drifted briefly. Home! The call of it was an ache in the heart. “The cool green hills of Earth,” a song had said.

Leaving Mars …

Viktor sent, “Checks completed.”

“Let's go,” Raoul called in a husky whisper.

“Start up,” Viktor said in a matter-of-fact voice she did not believe for a moment.

Sudden exhaust. The slender shape rose on a column of milky steam. The methane-oxygen burn looked smooth and powerful and her heart thudded as the ship rose into a ruddy sky.

“Max pump speed,” Viktor called. “Throttled flow.”

Fuel feed was choked down. They did not want to push it high into the sky, wasting fuel. It handled nicely, standing on its spewing spire as Viktor called out flow speeds and made it hover. Then drift sideways. Up. Then back.

“All nominal,” Viktor said, clipped and tight.

“Control A-sixteen and B-fourteen integrated,” Raoul answered. “Let's set her down.”

“Coming off from max—”

“Got three seventy eight on—”

Down they came through the ruddy sky, settling—

And a loud thump smacked into Julia's helmet, before she saw anything. The entire nozzle assembly was askew, the ship lurching in air. Ratcheting bangs rolled toward her.

It set down at a tipsy angle, spewing fumes, blowing sand over the damp smear that marked the takeoff.

Again, as if in a dream, she was running across the rocky ground, feet crunching, her shouts echoing in her helmet along with all the others, tinny over the comm.

JULIa'S MISSION TIMELINE

PART IV

MARS NEEDS WOMEN

27

JANUARY 29, 2018

O
NCE AGAIN SHE WAS SWIMMING IN THE
A
DELAIDE COMMUNITY POOL
. Her dad was there, slim, young, and fit, her mom limping slightly from the accident, as she would for the rest of her life. She and Bill were racing across the pool. She dove below the lane separator, as her instructor yelled, “Blow bubbles when you go under the rope.”

But something was wrong. She had no air left, and the surface was so far away …

She awoke, clutching her chest, heart pounding. It took several long seconds to realize she was breathing after all.

Viktor stirred beside her. “Time to get up already?” His voice was curiously flat.